Archipelago, by Natalie Bakopoulos

I was a little bit at a loss when the new year rolled around and I had to decide what to read first. Las year, I finished the only remaining Javier Marías novel available in English that I had not yet read. I do have a handful of other books of his I could have read – two books of essays, one book of short stories, something he wrote about Venice, but I wanted something else. My first impulse was to go for something monumental, so on January 1 I started Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé, which I have been meaning to read for some time. About 50 pages in, I realized it was not what I wanted at the moment. Archipelago was sitting on a side table in my living room, where it had been since my dad brought it over a couple months ago. He probably found it at a thrift store and grabbed it because I'm planning a trip (my first) to Greece later this year. And so, without thinking much about it, I grabbed it and started reading it instead. 

I was drawn into it right away. Bakopoulos' writing is clear and contemplative. The book's narrator is a writer and translator. As a person who reads a large volume of literature in translation, her musings on translation were really interesting to me. At one point, another character in the book who is a writer describes the experience of being translated as a kind of violence. Over the course of the book, the narrator is translating another work – from modern Greek into English – and contrary to her usual practice, she begins the translation without reading the book in full first, so she is discovering and creating the story at the same time. It left me thinking a lot about my own experience as a reader, occasionally a reader of works in languages other than my own native tongue. I am not fluent enough in any language to avoid translating as I go, but reading in another language forces you to think very hard about the sense of each word – to notice where translation fails. I think it leaves a deeper impression of the work because you've had to really contemplate it. Whereas when you read in your native language, it's easy to glide right through. 

A dark mood hangs over the whole book, which left me feeling always on the precipice – reading with a sense of dread, but wanting to go on. If I have one complaint about this book, it's that it didn't quite deliver on the mood. There is a constant foreboding in the book, an implication of terrible events to come, which make the actual events of the narrative a bit anticlimactic. And yet, I was also relieved by this. I didn't want whatever terrible violence might lay in wait to happen, and then ... it just didn't. I could see some readers finding this unsatisfactory, but overall I really enjoyed the book.